Posted on 03/16/2024 4:07:07 PM PDT by hardspunned
An American withdrawal from the defense of Europe is undesirable for any involved nation – unless, of course, their capital city is Moscow – but it is obvious that the current incarnation of the US-Nato relationship cannot continue.
The debate over military spending in Europe and in the US shows no sign of resolution, in spite of very recent spending increases from a few European countries. A wide gap persists between the 3.5 per cent of GDP commitment of the US and the below 2 per cent average in Europe. While this disparity has long been an irritant, now there is a serious political challenge of a growing number of Congressional members who seek to force Europe to do her part by reducing US funding.
However, military spending is a very poor measure of each country’s actual contribution to the military strength of the alliance. One major distortion is the almost universal practice of purchasing weapons from local manufacturers regardless of their merits or their unit costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
” Europee-ons...we saved their asses three times the last century, and it’s looking like we will have to again. “
No way. Absolutely not.
Next time, we let the Kaiser keep it.
Imagine being in a Polish trench waiting for the Russian assault. You look in the trench on your left, a bunch of Frenchies, to your right, the Dutch.
Another opportunity to show they can surrender faster than the French.
I mean, just listen to that rationale: American military suppliers benefit from our defense, so the American people should continue to do the paying and dying for our defense — just like they have for the last 70 years!
“Poland, now praised for its increased military spending, is actually using a great deal of the money to become a “Baltic naval power”, complete with its own shipyards. For a country that faces an overland threat from Russia with an army that is only now beginning to increase from absurdly low numbers (42,000 soldiers when Ukraine was invaded), any sort of naval spending must be counted as a luxury,”
This is the other problem. Those that actually spend, are spending on gold plated items like expensive airplanes and tanks and ships, rather than what Poland really needs for defence against Russia.
The Counter-Offensive shows what is required: huge minefields, massive artillery, mass numbers of cheap drones, and a large Reserve Army liable for callup.
Poland isn’t doing any of that.
There is no reason to continue in any type of alliance with Turkey.
Well, you do not want them on the other side fighting you. And we would have to find another place to park our nukes.
ping
Bring the nukes home, there are useless there. There are numerous ways to launch if necessary, location is irrevalent.
Except for the U.S.A., Turkey is the most powerful military nation in NATO. If you want to suit up and fight them, go right ahead.
If location of nukes is irrelevant, bring home all the nukes from everywhere, and don't get fussed if Russia or China puts nukes in Cuba, Tijuana or Juarez.
Back then? Absolutely. Now? I have no idea.
“our” nukes are best parked on submarines, not in questionable countries.
Go away, commie.
The US does need NATO. Dump it!! The Euros need to ditch their Socialism to pay their Military Defense.
Suck it up!!!
It would be wonderful. Yes. But Russia is only marginally Christian in the relevant sense, and the Russian people are still being brutalized by the Putin regime. It’s a pity, because he started out good back in the ‘90s, and that might have been the time to open the door, but he’s now on a conquest kick and has to be stopped.
He took over on December 31, 1999. At the time, he wasn't a dictator yet. He had to go after the oligarchs and then consolidate his power by eliminating his opposition.
He did the latter, but got in bed with the former, and yet plenty of Russians came back to take part in the renaissance. From there it was a frog boil.
Nope, you’re completely misreading the situation. If you were in his position, you’d have done the same thing. This entire affair is the result of 30 years of unchecked Western hegemony.
Dream on. Poor Vlad. He’s just mis-understood. Things started going south during Yeltsin’s mis-rule. He laid siege to the legislature and took out the dissident die-hard commie lawmakers and shot them. But Putin did not have to keep moving towards dictatorship. The bottom line is, he never believed in democratic reform of any sort, and the West would have applauded him if he had disavowed that act of Yeltsin and gotten back on the right track.
The entire affair is a reactionary movement away from the extreme poverty caused in 1991 by the collapse of the Soviet Union, not anything the West did or did not do. Next you’ll be blaming England and France for the rise of Hitler. If only those reparations hadn’t been so stringent.
The West is not the sun that the whole world revolves around. It’s often clueless, and sometimes mean and parochial. But so is Russia, Vietnam, China, the Middle East and Latin America. People are a@@-holes. The only nations that have truly grown up and put on their big boy pants are Japan, Germany and Poland. America has become a sh!t-show under Biden, but it didn’t start with him. I hope Trump will be on time to start the long process of fixing it.
Funny. Russia got given its seat at the European Council, was invited to every major sports and music tournament, got no blowback from invading Georgia or killing dozens of Polish politicians and diplomats by engineering a plane crash, got a mild rebuke but not much else for attempting to assassinate a Ukrainian presidential candidate...
While Europe was desperate to not rock the boat, Russia profited immensely from the oil and gas... While blackmailing Europe with persistent threats of turning the taps off if they didn’t get whatever they wanted.
Sure, they got the kid gloves all over despite being the biggest pains in the ass in the Eurasian space.
We had too many brain-dead people saying “don’t poke the bear!” for too long, and the more it was said the more liberties Moscow knew it could take.
We’re all paying a heavy price not for “provocation” but for listening to the “don’t poke the bear!” retards.
Trump was right when he told Putin to stop banging on about his nukes OR ELSE. It would’ve been a lot cheaper and a lot more effective if a united NATO response had been to tell Russia very forcefully that any liberty taking bullcrap from them would give us a reason to turn the Baltic into Lake NATO.
It’s happened now but only because Russia pushed the buttons so furiously that even Sweden, Norway and Finland decided to pick a side.
Word on the street is, after Putin’s TV retards CGI repeatedly demonstrated them wiping out the Republic of Ireland which is even more unconnected to the Ukraine situation than Switzerland is, even Dublin’s now considering the wisdom of staying neutral.
But you keep drinking that St Petersburg knock-off kool aid.
Imagine Bush, relying on Soviet promises of “not one inch west of East Germany, disbands NATO in 1992. Fast forward to 2022 and the announcement from the new president of Mexico, a Soviet installed stooge, that his communist regime was set to become the 30th member of the Warsaw Pact (France, England and Canada being numbers 27, 28, 29). Shortly after, as the WP trains and equips the Mexican armed forces, the Soviet premier comes to Juarez to scream “forced regime change” in DC as the WP armored divisions deploy along the Rio Grande. Further imagine that the plains of Texas had been the historical invasion route into the U.S. by coalitions of current WP members. The last invasion, fifty years prior, when a coalition of six current WP nations invaded the U.S. resulting in twenty million American deaths, including every Jew from Texas to DC before they were stopped. The U.S. would do nothing, right? My Ass!
Let’s consider another hypothetical. Imagine Israel, on its own volition, had ceded, with majority Jewish population, a portion of what had been Israel for three hundred years to Jordan. Imagine the Jordanians began a coordinated persecution of those Jews, in reality an ethnic cleansing (something you are very well acquainted with) of them. Imagine these Jews who protested were rounded up or murdered by the Jordanians. Imagine these Jews begged Israel for assistance before they were completely cleansed. Israel would do nothing, right? My Ass!
It’s the empty headed, media driven nonsense that you parrot regarding those exact situation but with shoes on different feet, that will result in WWIII.
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